If you’ve ever read through a few classic books,
you may have noticed some discrepancies.







Some are engaging, deep, or easy to read, while others seem so bad you wonder how people ever enjoyed them.




But why is that?







What exactly about these books that makes them enjoyable or unbearable?











What allows some books to hold up through the year while others fall out of favor?









To investigate the popularity of classic books in the modern day, we will be looking at 19 novels and stories published around the 19th century and comparing their features and current popularity based on modern Goodreads ratings.










We will start by examining the structure of these books.













Rating by Length of book













































Paragraph Length



























Word length














































Dialog





































While we were able to identify some trends for book rating from the structural data, it certainly leaves a lot unexplained.





How about the book “demographics”? Could this tell us more?








Author Gender

Not much to be seen here
















Year of Publication

No clear trends here either









So book demographics didn’t clear much up









Could the emotional content of book explain more about their popularity?









Positive vs Negative Emotion scale


The ratings show no clear preference for positive or negative language alone.




But what if we look at individual emotions?






Emotional scores of the books





Some emotions have a clear correlation with Rating,
like joy, anticipation, and trust


But others are more complicated,
like anger, disgust, and sadness







Looking at the points as a whole, the relationship doesn’t look strong.




However, if we exclude 5 specific books the rest follow a strong trend.




In fact, those books are similarly located for all of the emotional scores.




Could the overall quantity of emotion be an important predictor?




It seems that this phenomena is limitted to just these few books rather than being a general trend










So then, why are books like Brothers Karamazov and Anne of Green Gables so much high rated than other similar books?

Lets compare the emotional composition of Anne of Green Gables and The Awakening. Both are dramas with a young women protagonist, written by female authors around the end of the 19th century. However, Anne of Green Gables was an immediate hit and remains highly rated today, while the Awakening was criticized when first published, only gained some popularity later in the 20th century and remains lower rated today.





Anne of Green Gables The Awakening
4.31 3.68
1908 1899
Female Female
93740 45270
39 40
4.96 5.21
56.54 44.89
0.4914 0.3476

We can see some of the patterns from before in looking at these two books. Like…. But this isn’t enough to explain the changes in popularity. Why was the Awakening critized when it first came out, why was it revived later? Simply looking at an overview of structure and emotion isn’t enough to explain it. In cases like this, understanding the context is essential.